Standard Issuehttp://standardissuemagazine.com
Tue, 14 Aug 2018 12:01:55 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8The Sunday Quizhttp://standardissuemagazine.com/quizzes/the-sunday-quiz-49/
Sun, 30 Apr 2017 05:00:51 +0000http://standardissuemagazine.com/?p=125133It's the very last Standard Issue quiz, so we're asking you about some of the outrageous sexism we've covered in the last two-and-a-half years.

]]>7 Wonders: The final playlisthttp://standardissuemagazine.com/arts/7-wonders-final-playlist/
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 05:00:56 +0000http://standardissuemagazine.com/?p=125204It's the last playlist from us, so Standard Issue staff are picking a song to say goodbye with.

Look, I know it’s called Good Riddance and it’s actually a spiteful fuck-off from a broken heart to the one who smashed it, but, man, it’s also a beautiful ballad about making the most of what you’ve got while you’ve got it.

The swooping, swooning strings and acoustic picking, far-removed from Billie Joe Armstrong et al’s usual bad-tempered guitar thrashings, shot a bunch of cartoon punkers to megastardom and was used for weddings, funerals and TV montages across the globe.

And so I’m focusing on the brackets, because Standard Issue is by far the thing I’m proudest of in my life. I couldn’t have asked more of what we created: not just a kick-ass magazine with excellent, ground-breaking content, but also a community, a sisterhood, a reminder that none of us are alone even at the times we feel most lonely.

Thanks for reading us. Thanks for all the love. Thanks for being a stone cold pack of legends. It’s been a blast. Viva la podcast.

I’m terrible at feeling stuff. Or, to be more accurate, about talking about feeling stuff. So this, as you’d imagine, is an absolute nightmare. Particularly since I always try to take a Pollyanna approach to life. (Yep, I know that sounds like bullshit, but it’s truer than most things I say.)

And so here’s the mighty Hold Steady, who I’m kind of ashamed to have not found time to write about in the last two and a half years, with the most appropriate Pollyanna message of all. Stay Positive people. It’s been emotional. See you in June.

Not a day goes by when the pint-sized pop powerhouse that is Little Mix doesn’t offer at least some of the soundtrack to our kitchen.

I should say the original songs are rarely played in this setting, but I think the Little Mix lasses would be pretty impressed with the sound – and indeed vision – of me and my five-year-old singing the shit out of their back catalogue so far.

We usually try to base our pyjama-clad performance on the brilliant Liz Buckley’s description, which features in her Girls Bands 7 Wonders playlist: “When you watch them perform, they look like it’s for a round of the Hunger Games. Gritted teeth, steely-eyed, thighs tensed, ready to be picked off with a crossbow at any time.”

It’s quite the sight.

Although Salute is by no means the favourite track we belt out with gusto while the breakfast crumpets are toasting – and while I struggle to get on board with the notion that Jade, Perrie, Jesy and Leigh-Anne are actually “Representing all the women” – I figured this was the best one of theirs to sign off my very proud part in the first chapter of Standard Issue, which absolutely did. And will continue to do so. Fucking Salute indeed.

“It started out as a feeling / Which then grew into a hope / Which then turned into a quiet thought / Which then turned into a quiet word / And then that word grew louder and louder / ‘Til it was a battle cry.”

Regina Spektor definitely wrote this song about the founding of Standard Issue. But even if she didn’t, I’m pretty certain that, like hymns, there’s a Regina Spektor song for every occasion; births, deaths, marriages, baobabs. And this one perfectly sums up my feelings towards this spectacular organ. “You’ll come back when it’s over, No need to say goodbye” (she wrote that bit about making sure you download the podcasts).

It’s not often you’ll hear me sing the praises of The Beautiful South, but their 1989 hit Song for Whoever – with its none-more-cynical couplet “Deep, so deep / The number one I hope to reap / depends upon the tears you weep” – echoes resoundingly whenever I hear this song from Cohen’s 1967 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen.

First he’s rhapsodising the nameless woman’s “hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm”, then barely four lines later, chastising her for having eyes “soft with sorrow” as he legs it out of the door. Yeah, Len, you charming bastard. Don’t let the royalty cheque hit you on the way out.

But he does have a point. A relationship (or anything else that ends) isn’t automatically a failure if you’re not still clinging to it on your deathbed; better to mourn the loss and then treasure what remains: “You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me.” Besides, who can sustain melodrama when some genius producer has overdubbed your sensitive lyricism with a mouth harp twanging like a comedy erection? Quite.

I tried so hard to pick a goodbye song: something fierce, emotional and fitting for a final bow of this glorious online mag. My brain, it seems, had other plans, planting the corny but goddam uplifting riffs from Dirty Dancing’s final fling in my noggin until it drowned out thoughts of ANYTHING that’d spare my blushes.

So what the hell, I’m having (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life, a grand finale with a fitting sentiment and a sax-break so bloody catchy it’s impossible to not leave things on a high.*
*Emotionally that is. The rest depends on how many gins you’ve necked before attempting the lift.

One of the best things that has ever happened in sport, if not in the world, was Leicester City winning the Premier League last year after almost being relegated from it at the previous season’s end.

In the celebrations that ensued at the club’s King Power Stadium, tremendous human and arguably one of the most-loved football managers of all time Claudio Ranieri brought out Andrea fucking Bocelli to do a little turn.

The Italian wept as his compatriot belted out the operatic hits and gestured for fans to pipe the fuck down and respect his artistry a la Kanye West at the Grammys, building to a rousing crescendo in which Bocelli ripped off his sports-casual hoodie to reveal a Leicester City shirt, with his own name on the back. Technically, this happened during Nessun Dorma, not the song that followed, but I still can’t hear it without having a little cry.

Of course, the brutal sacking of my pretend dad (I’m pretending, not him, to be clear on this) Ranieri less than a year later left something of a bitter taste in the mouth and a giant charisma vacuum in the Premier League, but as we know (and presumably so does Bocelli) all good things must come to an end, eventually.

]]>Interview: Cathy Tysonhttp://standardissuemagazine.com/arts/interview-cathy-tyson/
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 05:00:50 +0000http://standardissuemagazine.com/?p=125210The powerhouse actor talks feminism, fear and women in authority with Justine Brooks, as they catch up between rehearsals for the world premiere of Winter Hill.

Cathy Tyson: “On a very personal level, this play made me think about what I’m not doing out of fear.” Photos by Ray Jefferson, Bolton Camera Club.

You’d imagine Cathy Tyson, award-winning star of stage and screen, would be pretty unflustered about taking on a brand new play. But she’s feeling challenged.

She’s currently in rehearsals for Winter Hill, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s new play set in Bolton, and it’s seriously stretching her comfort zones. “It’s never been done before and so there’s nothing to hang it on,” she explains.

Tyson, perhaps best known for her appearance in the 1986 movie Mona Lisa alongside Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine, is working with an all-female cast in Wertenbaker’s new drama. The story follows a group of seemingly ordinary women striving to protect their community from unscrupulous developers building a skyscraper hotel building, the largest in Europe, on the land that is called Winter Hill.

It’s a David and Goliath tale of people taking charge of their destiny, exploring the lengths to which people will go, in order to protect what they love.

Tyson plays Irene, deputy leader of the council. “I’m learning about being in the council, about what it is to be a councillor. Where does the seed come from to become more involved locally, to go beyond yourself and to think about community? I’m learning in ways I’m not used to doing, which isn’t always a smooth-running thing, but I’m not retreating to my comfort zones.”

Wertenbaker’s play explores the boundaries between freedom fighting and terrorism. Does Tyson believe that activism is now more important than ever?

“There are various ways to make change: the small ways, and the active ways, the moderate ways where people chip away. Some change is slow. Many people are active but don’t get the headlines.”

“I’m interested in our own misogyny towards ourselves. What is clear to me is that women in positions of responsibility don’t have to be Margaret Thatcher. They don’t have to be Tomb Raider in order to denote strength.”

Thanks to her breakthrough role as a high-class hooker in Mona Lisa, and her central part in Kay Mellor’s 1990s television series Band Of Gold, Tyson has a reputation for playing steely women. “I want to play all sorts of characters,” she says. “The important thing for me is to portray the accuracy.”

For Winter Hill, this means she’s had to have a rethink.

“I first thought that because my character is a deputy council leader that she had to be a certain way. I realised that I was blocking out vulnerability but that I can be afraid and be a strong woman at the same. There’s been a shift for me to discover that Irene is scared and unsure, which are things that in a patriarchal environment can be deemed as ‘feminine’ or ‘weak’.

“I’m interested in our own misogyny towards ourselves. What is clear to me is that women in positions of responsibility don’t have to be Margaret Thatcher. They don’t have to be Tomb Raider in order to denote strength.”

“It’s an exciting and inspirational group – a caring group of actresses,” says Tyson. “Just because we’re women doesn’t mean we’re feminists. Some men are feminists and some women aren’t. That’s important to remember. You could meet a group of women who want to talk about washing machines and Hello! magazine.”

Working on Winter Hill has brought much to Tyson as a woman. I get the sense that she has entered a stage in her life in which she feels free, unencumbered even. “I’m a mother. And I’ve been a single mother bringing up a child in London, which is in itself a form of activism.” (Her son Jack is now 29 and quite able to look after himself. These days the pair work collaboratively – Tyson writes poems and Jack puts them to music.)

Tyson with the cast of Winter Hill, on its real-life namesake near Bolton.

Tyson is keen to point out that she’s learned a lot as a person from working on Wertenbaker’s play.

“I want to see more of this kind of work – I want to see more respect of female talent, for it to be a regular occurrence, not just a one off. I’ve been inspired about female leadership, both with my character and through working with a female director. Timberlake has created work for all these people and I’d like to see it beyond this production.

“The women in this play have interesting jobs: a mathematician, a council worker, a university lecturer. One of the themes is about being happily unmarried, which really interested me.

“My character is not in a relationship and she has a fulfilling life. This play tells us that you can have a fulfilling life without being in a relationship, without being a mother – not being anti those roles either, just happy as you are. I think that really challenges traditional roles. I like the way the women in Winter Hill don’t talk about men. They talk about books, work and everything else.

“On a very personal level, this play made me think about what I’m not doing out of fear. I have a driving licence but I haven’t driven for years. I was thinking that if I did start to drive again I should probably take my test again, but one of the cast said, ‘You’d pick it up in no time’. And I think I would.

“That made me think about what else I have not been doing, out of fear. It has been a fertile time!”

Winter Hill is at Octagon Theatre Bolton, Thursday 11 May to Saturday 3 June. Click here for more info and tickets.

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The business of writing about women’s sport can be a bit infuriating, to be honest.

For a start, it’s rarely about sport – and look, I’m as guilty of it as anyone, having spent almost the last two years tricking Standard Issue readers into thinking they cared about sport.

Sometimes they did already, to be fair, but often they did not, having never been invited to sit at the table with the dudes, who grew up on this stuff. The dudes were spoon-fed it, in fact, even against their will at times, because, you know, not all men grow moist at the sound of the referee’s whistle or the pontificating over Arsenal’s switch from a back-four to a back-three.

When writing about women’s sports, the quest for angles and hooks can grow tiresome. Fortunately there are many, although generally associated with some dude (hashtag NotAllMen) saying something sexist, or some governing body missing the point, or a club literally not knowing the year is 2017.

Often it isn’t about sport itself, more the issues the sport raises regarding the narrow view society still holds of women (and often men, too). But every now and again that meant I’d get a tweet from someone telling me they’d not given a rat’s arse about football in the past, but they’d actually just read something that interested them about it.

That was the kind of thing that made it all worthwhile. Because the more women take an interest, the more little girls might take an interest, and the closer we get to tackling some of those issues that prevented women engaging in sport.

“For the first time you have a high-profile brand, targeted principally at women, sponsoring a women’s football team. The deal effectively signals women’s football stepping out of the shadow of men’s football, rather than simply mimicking or mirroring the men’s game.”

It feels fitting then, as Standard Issue draws to a close as an online magazine, to end with a happy story that caught my eye last week, and one that shows great progress in women’s sport.

In this story football – the often much-maligned beautiful game with its seedy stories of grotesque sums of cash and all the entitlement that goes with it (to possessions, to queue-jumping at Tiger Tiger, to women’s bodies, etc) – in fact leads the way in women’s sport yet again.

It is a mind-boggling statistic and one that I often raise, that according to the most recent research undertaken by Women in Sport, only 0.4 per cent of all reported UK sponsorship deals in sport are for women.

More baffling still is that, until last week, no female-focused brand had sponsored a Women’s Super League football team, the most prestigious league in which women in England play football. Enter Avon – yes Avon, a cosmetics brand – offering a three-year deal to Liverpool Ladies’ Football Club.

Liverpool Ladies FC: sponsors calling.

The general manager of Avon UK hailed the “truly inspirational women, working together to achieve their goals” and Professor Simon Chadwick at the University of Salford spoke of the huge significance of the deal, telling Reuters: “For the first time you have a high-profile brand, targeted principally at women, sponsoring a women’s football team. The deal effectively signals women’s football stepping out of the shadow of men’s football, rather than simply mimicking or mirroring the men’s game.”

He added: “The fact that football clubs are really starting to take their women’s teams seriously shows that we are in a new era for the game… The fact that they are investing is not only a vote of confidence in the women’s game but it is also implicit acknowledgment that there is money to be made in the women’s game.”

It is a significant move for a cosmetics brand, too, given the ludicrous misconception that women who play sport somehow aren’t like other women or are less feminine, a misconception drummed into us practically from birth. Interestingly, Liverpool men’s team has a long-standing endorsement with cosmetics brand Nivea.

Media outlets like The Offside Rule podcast, the work of Women in Football and the Women’s Sports Trust, and journalists like Eleanor Oldroyd, Anna Kessel and Jacqui Oatley, who have all been plugging away at this long before anyone else gave a shit, have challenged this kind of nonsense.

And it’s the recognition by magazines like Standard Issue that women’s interests are broad and varied and if they give a shit about football or tennis, they should bloody well get the chance to read about it, that has shown the possibility of commercial opportunities in women’s sport.

I’ve been beyond proud to be part of it and to continue to be part of that growing chorus, pioneering women’s sport as we move onto the podcast.

I hope that we will increasingly be joined by other women’s media outlets in this, because, seriously now, how can we ask men to give us opportunities we don’t give ourselves?

]]>Me-timehttp://standardissuemagazine.com/lifestyle/me-time/
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 05:00:55 +0000http://standardissuemagazine.com/?p=125192Abigail Burdess is all up for pampering, but does it have to come with a calorie count?

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“Me-time”. There’s a sign outside a hairdressers on my road that offers me it. Time, woman, just for you, away from serving the needs of others: your children, your husband, your parents. Time for YOU, to do what YOU want! Relax! Put your feet up! And make your body socially acceptable!

You have some time for yourself! Use it to fulfil other people’s beauty ideal! Pull out your hair! Slough off your skin! Electrocute off your fat! You must be smooth, shiny, bald! Just take a little time out from serving others to critically examine your physical self and attempt to remedy your failings!

Men’s ‘me-time’ involves drinking beer and shouting at the television with their mates; women’s involves pampering themselves with a bit of self-hate. Ooh I’m so pampered – all that self-hate I’ve been trying not to roll around in during my working day, I can just dive into that hate now and rub my moustache in it.

At the far end of me-time lies the temple of me-time, the spa. It’s not that a spa can’t be fun but I haven’t been often. My husband gave me a fancy spa weekend for my 40th so I went dutifully, alone, for three days of extreme washing. I have to say I was ungrateful for this gift. It felt like someone had given me deodorant for a Secret Santa – here, you’re a soap-dodger, go and get clean. But there were some good bits.

“It must work as a business model, this combination of strokes and insults. It’s like we women can’t pay for some pleasure without also paying someone to tell us what’s wrong with us at the same time.”

I am, for example, a big fan of recreational sweating. I love to perspire in almost any context but in a tiny pine box you’re positively encouraged to do it. Mostly, I like being warm, and if sitting on a slatted bench next to a naked middle-manager is the price I pay to be cosy, so be it.

The trouble is, at a spa the sweating is sold with a dollop of self-hate on the side. Signs informed me about weight loss. Then after the sweating they offered me some ‘nutritional advice’. I declined. But I couldn’t help overhearing what snake-oil some of the other poor bastards on their holidays were sold.

I also got rubbed. I like being rubbed. Who doesn’t like being rubbed? But then the rubber informed me the rubbing would improve the appearance of my cellulite (I didn’t know I had cellulite).

Then he told me I was “holding a lot of tension in my body”. Jokes were bad for me. Not only was I uglier than I’d realised, I’d chosen the wrong career. Me-time, guys! I had to spend quite a lot of my own version of ‘me-time’ pausing Ryan Gosling movies to get over it.

But this must work for them, as a business model, this combination of strokes and insults. It’s like we women can’t pay for some pleasure without also paying someone to tell us what’s wrong with us at the same time.

I have had one amazing experience of a spa. On my hen night some mates took me to a place run by the council. I’ve tried to find it and it doesn’t exist now. Like some sort of magical shop, I’m hoping it’ll reappear when I need it most. It was a beautiful Art Deco building with a series of sweat pods filled with naked lesbians. It was brilliant. You could order a fry-up for £3. This was just before smoking in a public building was banned. So I sat with my best mates eating sausages and smoking fags in the nude. It was how I imagine a sauna in Roman times was.

It was all about pleasure, with no mention of calories or treatments, and there was no one to remind us that we’re ugly, or tense, or too hairy or too bumpy or too damn female. Now I see that written down it’s possible this place only ever existed in a dream. That’s what I call me-time.

]]>Hey! Teachers! I’ll leave my kids at homehttp://standardissuemagazine.com/lifestyle/hey-teachers-ill-leave-kids-home-18/
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 05:00:09 +0000http://standardissuemagazine.com/?p=125176Hazel Davis and her fella are home-educating their kids. In her final column, she weighs up the pros and cons.

Ages ago, a well-meaning friend told us that she believed we should home-educate our children for the good of society. To create brilliant free-thinking individuals who could go on to be prime ministers and activists. We smiled politely and thought, “Jeez. Not sure we want that. What we mainly want to do is avoid having to do that whole school gate thing.”

It was a nice thing for her to say, but now and again I think about it and wonder why we’re actually doing this. Who’s it actually for? I certainly think about this when I hear about amazing projects my friends’ kids are doing at school or when I hear about enduring friendships struck up in reception class. Or when I hear they’re learning Nepalese nursery rhymes.

But I also think about it when I get an email from a friend raging because her kid’s being bullied at school and she can’t do anything about it. Or another friend whose child is having his PE lesson docked because he failed to fill in an online multiple choice quiz about a book. Or another friend whose teacher routinely puts spelling mistakes in her children’s books.

Yes, there are disadvantages to this choice. There are things we’ll inevitably miss. There will probably be massive gaps in our children’s knowledge that they will hate us for forever.

“I can take my five-year-old out to late-night gigs and concerts because a) school of life and b) breakfast when we like, mate. We let the girls stay up until 10pm playing their violins the other night because what harm could it do?”

Managing social encounters is an effort. They do have friends but we’ve had to orchestrate it. They haven’t come running home from school with a new pal we know nothing about. We know ALL about their friendships (so far) and that’s a bit of a shame.

Also, there’s no let-up. They don’t often go out and give us a few hours’ peace (it’s usually them being dropped off somewhere). I also have a lot of interviews on my Dictaphone with fighting/singing children in the background.

But the advantages more than outweigh these. We theoretically never have to get up in the morning. There’s no rush-hour tussle. There are no lost uniforms (no, wait, scrap that, they’re ALWAYS losing their gym class outfit), no last-minute homework dashes, no “Sorry have to get back to do the school run” and no “Shit, I can’t do any work because it’s the holidays.”

But more importantly I can take my five-year-old out to late-night gigs and concerts because a) school of life and b) breakfast when we like, mate. We let the girls stay up until 10pm playing their violins the other night because what harm could it do? We’re having a week-long family holiday in EARLY JUNE. Bite us.

I get to hang out with my kids in the mornings and I don’t have to rush back from work to find them exhausted or crying over their homework. Or I can come home late, miss their bedtimes but make up for it in the morning.

And then there’s the swearing. We can use the expression “dicking around” and “You’re being a massive bellend” and not worry about being called into school.

We can teach sex ed in the way that we want to (via the medium of Grease).

We can debunk stereotypes we feel need debunking.

We can use story examples that don’t involve girls being princesses and boys being footballers (that one’s thanks to another friend’s kid’s regressive school).

And we can teach our girls that, as the only pupils in the school, they can achieve anything they want to, in any subject they like.

]]>Doodlebughttp://standardissuemagazine.com/misc/doodlebug-33/
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 05:00:44 +0000http://standardissuemagazine.com/?p=125179New(ish) mum Samantha Dooey-Miles is charting her life in doodles. In her last Doodlebug, she lists the things she’s had to bid farewell to.

]]>Here it is dear reader, the final Doodlebug. The 33rd Doodlebug to be precise. A number which seems incredible given my certainty each week I’d run out of material.

In the previous 32 instalments I’ve covered: how people are weird about breastfeeding, my love of leggings and of my daughter’s cheese dance, my intense dislike of my nursery enemy – I could go on (and by now you know that it is true) but I won’t.

No matter what the subject of that week’s column, the core of Doodlebug remained the same as it was when I started publishing my doodles on my blog, A New Essex Girl: me navigating life as a new(ish) mum.

The odd, miserable ‘what the hell have I done?’ days aside, motherhood has been great. I feel love for my daughter in quantities I did not know were possible. Every day I experience true joy that I’ve created a family with the handsome man I married.

This happiness comes at a cost and I’ve had to say goodbye to a variety of things I felt just as passionately about in my old pre-child life. For instance I’ve said:

• Bye-bye breasts I used to know. Your pert glory has been snatched away too soon.
• Ta-ta being able to do things impromptu. Quick drink after work, how I miss you.
• See you later Sunday morning lie-ins. And by ‘later’, I reckon about 12 years.
• Au revoir peeing in privacy!

Now there’s a new one to add to the list. On a scale of sad goodbyes, Standard Issue closing is sadder than my boobs deteriorating, but not as painful as never sleeping past 8am until the year 2029.

I will miss you all on a Friday tweeting me brilliant, funny stuff about your own lives. Thank you to everyone who has read Doodlebug. So long, Standard Issue!

Compassionate, a self-confessed ‘conscious consumer’ and certainly one of the most interesting and positive characters to emerge from punk, she was an artist who transcended the genre and much more besides to earn her place in the firmament as a true maverick, a thinker, a creative pioneer, a star.

She looked outwards, using her songs in X-Ray Spex and beyond to hold up the deadening aspects of life – consumerism, materialism, ‘bondage’ – to the light to be looked at, questioned, sometimes with drama, often with biting humour. Most of us are in bondage now: the most obvious and widespread bondage being soul-sucking social media and the need to be ‘liked’. Poly would have had a few things to say about that.

Many roads have led to Poly throughout my adult life. I always loved the album Germfree Adolescents (Let’s Submerge is my favourite track) and we crossed paths a few times, initially when I was writing my first book Typical Girls? The Story of The Slits, and then when we worked together around the time of her 2008 comeback show at the Roundhouse.

I felt affection for her instantly – it was impossible not to. She was a delight, almost childlike but with an inner core of strength, the core that could conjure up that warrior-cry voice at any moment, or satirise the artifice and posery of showbiz with incisiveness and style. There was innocence there, but Poly was no fool.

I’d also worked with Poly’s daughter Celeste Bell during the writing of my book How’s Your Dad? Living In The Shadow of a Rock Star Parent, for which Celeste shared some fascinating and often very funny insights from her childhood. So I was over the moon when, last summer, Celeste contacted me to say she wanted to put together a book about her mother’s life.

She explained that she had inherited an incredible archive of previously unseen material, kept safe for years by the late Falcon Stuart, Poly’s former manager. (Thanks must go to Falcon’s partner Alice Hiller for passing this collection on to Celeste.)

This felt like a gift, and I was instantly excited by what we could do – visions of collating a highly illustrated, super-colourful coffee table book sprang to mind (and, thanks to Omnibus Press, who have taken on the book with great enthusiasm, that’s exactly what we’re going to do).

Serendipitously, I’d also recently become pals with the very talented director Paul Sng (Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain; Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle). Paul had asked whether I had any ideas for music documentaries that we could collaborate on, and when I considered the visual treasures Celeste had in her care, it seemed natural to ask her whether she’d be happy making a film as well as a book.

Happily, she said yes, as did Paul – and now, here we are, working with Doc‘n Roll Films. Paul has made a stunning trailer which thrills me every time I watch it, and we are currently crowd-funding production costs via Indiegogo (we have just a few days to go at the time of writing, so please dig deep if you can/are so inclined!).

It’s been so gratifying to see how much support the campaign has attracted – £30,976 at the time of writing. It shows that now is the time for a celebration and reconsideration of Poly Styrene. All being well both the film, Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, and the book (as yet untitled) will be out in November 2018, to mark the 40th anniversary of Germfree Adolescents. (Apologies if that makes you feel old.)

“Most of us are in bondage now: the most obvious and widespread bondage being soul-sucking social media and the need to be ‘liked’. Poly would have had a few things to say about that.”

There was so much more to Poly Styrene than the howl, the braces, the dayglo, and rather than concentrate solely on the punk years – punk being a story which has already been told many times and in many ways – the thread running through this film will be the enduring, evolving connection between a mother and her daughter.

Our director Paul came up with the idea that each ‘chapter’ of the film should open with a letter written and narrated by Celeste to her mother, charting each stage of her life. It works beautifully. We can’t give away too much more at this stage, but suffice to say this is not going to be your average rock doc.

Tragically, Poly was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the Noughties, and she passed away on 25 April 2011, but her final album Generation Indigo was fresh, fun and simultaneously sounded contemporary and reflected her punk roots, with observational and often haunting songwriting and spirituality all in one fell swoop.

Poly really was – is – the queen of punk, and it is a real privilege to be working on these two projects with Celeste and a great team. Poly deserves to be remembered with love and appreciation, and my hope is that both book and film will help carry Poly’s blazing flame far into the future, so that people will be inspired and motivated by this incendiary spirit for years to come.

To find out more and to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign for Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, visit the Indiegogo page.

Ever wonder why the unknown is more scary than the reality? Take the snap general election; having resigned myself to Tory leadership for years to come, there’s now a faint glimmer of hope – and I feel worse. Why’s that then?

Perhaps when we offset the worst case scenario against the glimmer of hope, it looks much darker and far more scary in comparison. Shine a light next to a monster’s face and you’ll see all the gory details. It reminds us how real it is.

It’s the same with theatre. Well, no, not the same exactly. I’d much rather enjoy a night at the theatre than Tory politics. But what I’m talking about is not just theatre, it’s participation theatre. Are you scared yet? You should be.

Something Terrible Might Happen is a new production (part theatre, part standup) from Leeds-based arts company Uncanny Theatre. It’s a response to our increasingly fearful society.

I spoke to the people behind the show, Matt Rogers and Natalie Bellingham, to find out why they thought it was a good idea to parcel up our fear and deliver it back to us in a theatre for fun.

“It’s a fact that we are statistically the safest people who have ever lived… but deep down I don’t believe it even though I want to.”

Natalie Bellingham: Something unexpected, a conversation in the pub later and, if they are lucky, a cola cube.

Matt Rogers: It’s a show about fear, so not knowing is all part of it; but I’d say that a spike in adrenaline, cold sweats and prickling of the hairs at the back of your neck wouldn’t be out of the picture.

Hmm… I’m a little nervous. It’s interactive theatre. What if you pick me out of the audience and I die of embarrassment? It’s an interesting choice of format for the topic.

NB: It’s the only format for a show about fear!

MR: We do everything that we can to prepare the audience for the worst. I think we’re very reassuring; like the presence of a policeman with a machine gun at a train station, or a very long safety talk about something that you never considered to be dangerous before.

As to your fear of being picked… we don’t generally pick people. The group sort of self-selects after a fashion. Which in some ways puts us a little bit on edge too.

What inspired the show?

MR: There was a moment a couple of years ago where it started to feel like fear was the primary way that people were engaging with the world. Suspicion and mistrust seemed to be everywhere, but it was mixed with this air of nostalgia for a time when people ‘didn’t have to’ respond to each other this way. It just felt like that sentiment needed unpacking a little bit.

NB: As a company, we all have a very different relationship to fear, which seems important to share as we were all initially inspired by different things.

I’m a fairly anxious person and I’ve been brought up in a particularly fearful household which for many years coloured the way I saw the world and is something I have had to try hard to undo. I find the world exhausting and as things seemingly continue to get worse I just find myself asking if we’re all going to be OK.

It’s a fact that we are statistically the safest people who have ever lived… but deep down I don’t believe it even though I want to. The title perhaps connects with me the most; I found a particularly interesting article that looked at how people often think about the thing they definitely don’t want to happen, then become fixated on that worst case scenario, and how we then tend to adjust our behaviour to avoid it.

So, is it all down to the media then? This irrational sense of fear we all share?

MR: The show is more about a kind of shared state of societal fear. I feel like blaming this kind of fear 100 per cent on media influence is a bit of a cop-out. It plays a big role, but we also take decisions every day that impact how we respond to one another.

I was chatting to a taxi driver the other day, and he was explaining that he didn’t pick up lone drunk women because he didn’t want to be the last person who saw them if anything bad happened to them. There’s such a complicated tapestry of fears woven together in that sentiment, that I can’t help but think that we’re talking about the right thing at the right time.

NB: The show looks at fear in relation to compassion. Does how much we fear affect how much we care? Can it actually see us retreating from the world? We are all people with experiences and we reflect (sometimes pushing to the extreme) how this can influence our experience and relationship to the world and what that could mean for us.

What are you most terrified of?

NB: I simply have only one thing to say. FUNGUS.

MR: I’m more concerned that my relative lack of fear makes me some sort of mutant that will be burned to death by an angry mob one day, but I think that everyone has that one… right?

Now you know it is interactive theatre, there’s every chance you could end up doing something silly and it’s all about fear. I can confirm that it will be terrifying. So now you know for sure, there’s really nothing to worry about. Is there?

So how’s about it readers? Are you game?

Part theatre, part standup, part childish prank by people old enough to know better, Something Terrible Might Happen promises a night of laughing in the face of fear, knocking on the doors of strangers and embracing all that we’re afraid of.
The show previews at GIFT (Gateshead International Festival of Theatre) on 29 April and then will continue to put the shits up audiences in Wakefield, Sheffield, Salford, Harrogate, Doncaster, Leeds and Derby. For full tour dates and tickets, visit the website.

For the last couple of weeks the cats and I have been serenaded at every available opportunity by an anonymous bird, which has taken up residence in the large rambling rose cloaking the front of the cottage.

There are songs to welcome the dawn, songs while we enjoy our breakfast, songs over lunchtime, songs in the evening (loud enough to be heard over the telly) and songs at bedtime to sign off.

The song we hear now is not the same song we heard at the beginning of April. What started as simple repetitions of four alternating notes has extended to a full octave embroidered with trills, flourishes, recitative and a swooping endnote before the whole performance goes around again.

I’ve gone through the RSPB website and listened to recordings of all the birds I’ve seen in the garden but nothing sounds quite the same. My best guess is that it’s a blackbird, or possibly a robin, although it might be a thrush.

Whatever it is, it’s delightful and I can’t think of a better way to start the day than sipping a large mug of coffee in dappled spring sunlight while achingly beautiful birdsong laps around my ears. I should sell tickets.

It sounds idyllic and it is, or rather it would be if Mr Pushkin Cat and I were not sharing the cottage with a psychopath. Madame Sodoffskaya Cat has revealed herself to be a cat of uncertain temperament. She is the Norman Bates of the feline world.

Madame Sodoffskaya Cat: only soft on the outside.

This is a common trait with tortoiseshell cats and having some previous experience – Stanley, of blessed memory – I can vouch for that. The colour would drain from the face of the family vet at the sight of Stanley purring benignly in her basket – “Haha… a little spitfire this one,” as he attempted to insert a thermometer into the rear end of a spitting flailing ball of claws and teeth.

The Sodoffskaya likes the world arranged on her terms and I can’t blame her for that, but the Cat and I fall under the heading of ‘staff’. Yes, she might wriggle around on her back like the Whore of Babylon but that is not an invitation to stroke her tummy, nor is purring fit to bust an indication that she would like her chin rubbed. She is a cat armed to the gunwales with sharp pointy things.

I honestly thought she was mellowing a bit and I said as much to my youngest when she popped round the other day but then she (the Sodoffskaya, not the daughter) suddenly went off on one, lovingly embraced my arm and bit me through two layers of woollies. That was a two-plaster job.

Her disposition is mercurial and given to fleeting irrational hatreds – slippers, my hairbrush, the log basket… It’s not uncommon to find her spread-eagled across a door trying to bite that. Temporarily embarrassed, as though I’ve interrupted her in a private moment, she freezes in a ‘nothing to see here’ kind of way and then saunters off into another room. The other day she jumped out of the bedroom window.

As if all that isn’t unnerving enough, once or twice a month she behaves as though she’s been out on an almighty bender, lurching into my bedroom at three in the morning and slurring the cat equivalent of “I bloody love you, I do.”

“The fact that Madame Sodoffskaya Cat has a pathetic little girly miaow is her saving grace. It’s like finding out that Conan the Barbarian speaks like Po from Teletubbies.”

She clambers up onto the bed and then inches her way up on her belly until she squirms in under my arm, sighs contentedly and set about kneading ‘air biscuits’, all the while purring at 150 decibels and exhaling hot, rodent-scented breath directly into my face. This would be fine if a) she wasn’t quite so fluffy and I didn’t have asthma, b) she wasn’t enormous and c) she wasn’t a copper-bottomed certifiable maniac.

I sleep with one eye open in case she decides to have an episode although she hasn’t… yet. A relief when you consider the defensive capabilities of pyjamas. She does, however, make a point of picking out the twigs and leaves she’s collected in her immense furry trousers and spitting them out onto the bedspread.

Mr Pushkin Cat enjoying the sun.

The Cat finds it all quite baffling but he is, alas, completely in thrall to this Boudicca among cats and is more than happy to comply with his beloved’s wishes and let me know in his best basso profundo when she is on the wrong side of the cottage door wishing admittance. The fact that she has a pathetic little girly miaow is her saving grace (as well as her remarkable beauty). It’s like finding out that Conan the Barbarian speaks like Po from Teletubbies.

Living in this cottage and being a writer is a funny old life but it’s one I enjoy, except for when a column comes to an end, as this one does now. Writing for Standard Issue has been the greatest of pleasures and it was truly an honour to have been part of something very special, so thank you to the editorial team (who are nothing short of magnificent) and to you for joining me as I transitioned back from city dweller to Rutland resident.

But now, I have a book deadline looming and my lawn is covered in sheep shit because we’ve just moved the ewes and lambs off down the hill, so if you have a minute, the shovel’s by the door…